War by Other Means

By LISA NAPOLI

Published: March 27, 2003

''AS of right now, I have one kill and zero deaths,'' Nick Averna, 15, said nonchalantly as he sat in the den of his family's home in Orange, Conn. Joystick in hand, headset in place, he was playing Socom: U.S. Navy Seals, a video game described by the gaming Web site IGN.com as the ''king of the military shooter genre.''

As he navigated the sandy terrain of a digitally rendered Iraqi desert that looked eerily realistic on a 60-inch screen, he could hear other players on his team -- assembled randomly from those who had logged on around the world -- react to the action. In response to the permutations of the battle, he could draw on an arsenal of weapons like those available to soldiers currently at war in Iraq.

It was Saturday afternoon, less than 72 hours after the real war began, and the peace of Nick's home in the bucolic town between New Haven and Bridgeport was undisturbed by the action on the Sony PlayStation 2 console. Nick had the sound effects, as booming and realistic as the images, turned down for a visitor.

Typically Nick and five other neighborhood teenagers log on from their own homes and form teams with others online for combat. This time they gathered at the Averna home, showing a reporter how the game worked and talking about the war.

''I haven't made a connection between this and the war, until you asked,'' Nick said. ''You control these guys on the screen with a button. I would never want to do this for real. I would be too afraid.'' Text flashed at the top of the screen: ''You were killed by 2X Comcast with a m63A.''

''Kill or be killed'' encounters are, of course, at the core of a stream of video games, from medieval fantasies to contemporary military simulations to more lurid fare. Even with a war in Iraq unfolding on live television, the shooting in dens and game arcades goes on with little pause. The question is whether there are new lessons to be drawn.

Rob Smith, editor in chief of PC Gamer magazine, said a case could be made for war-themed video games as a kind of pedagogic device, a tool to help young people become more familiar with the armaments talked about on television. After all, the Army itself has created a free game called America's Army as a recruitment tool. But Mr. Smith contends that games, and their enjoyment, are altogether distinct from the realities of war.

''There is a war going on with real people dropping real bombs,'' he said, ''and the connection between that and games is such a monumental leap it's difficult to make a correlation.''

Indeed, one of Nick's fellow players in Orange said it was easy to separate the two. ''Real war you can't control with a joystick,'' said Mike Epstein, 15, who his friends agree is the best player of the game in their neighborhood circle (although they also agree that he plays it too long and too often). ''When you die, you die.''

Another friend, Brian Skinner, 16, quoted a character from a movie who had served in a war but was now a football player: ''Someone says to him, 'It's going to be a war out there on the field.' And the guy says, 'I've been to war. This is just a game.'''

In other game-playing households, though, perceptions vary.

Lisa Jacobs of San Diego, a mother of four whose husband is a special-operations lieutenant colonel on duty in Kuwait, said she worried about whether children can make a distinction between reality and the violence of games. ''Regrettably, they're so realistic,'' said Ms. Jacobs, the daughter of a retired admiral. ''There has to be a desensitization. I remember the first James Bond game. I went downstairs, my in-laws are sitting there with the kids, who are playing this game, shooting things up. I thought, 'Oh, my God, I hate this.'''

In the 12 years since the Persian Gulf war, she said, video games have become even more realistic, and with the popularity of home consoles, more pervasive.

Ms. Jacobs said she realized that shielding her children from exposure to guns and violence was practically impossible -- not just because of her husband's line of work, but also because of the pervasiveness of those things in American culture. When her children, ages 8 to 15, were smaller, she and her husband did not let them play with squirt guns. Still, one of her sons nibbled on his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and made it into the shape of a gun at age 3.

Now they play games standard to many American homes, from Max Payne, about a weapons-wielding undercover cop, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, a thriller in which players must protect national security, to The Lord of the Rings, based on the Tolkien classic.

A rating system established in 1994 is supposed to help parents filter out games with unsuitable content. Socom: U.S. Navy Seals, for instance, is rated M, for mature viewing by those 17 and older. But that designation does not deter under-age players and is rarely enforced by game retailers or arcade operators.

On Saturday night at the Westfield Mall in Trumbull, Conn., about 12 miles west of Orange, another group of teenagers was having its own combat experience. Kevin Martin, 17, was shooting with a red plastic gun tethered to an arcade game called Area 51. In the upper left-hand corner of the console was a tiny warning label reading ''Animated Violence: Strong.''

As he played, he seemed unfazed, his face serene and friendly. He was killing time, killing aliens, before meeting some friends for the evening.